Photo by George Steinmetz, September 2002

In 1970, artist Robert Smithson built a massive sculpture as a piece of land art, or an “earthwork,” that is normally found just below the surface of the water of Great Salt Lake at Rozel Point. In drought conditions, the art piece, titled Spiral Jetty, becomes visible, often with salt encrustations that decorate the basalt spiral formation. Great Salt Lake, in addition to being salty, is also home to microorganisms that live or even thrive in extremely salty conditions and produce pigments that give them a red to orange color, which becomes visible in the water at times. Chau Tu reports for this week’s Science Friday written piece:

Great Salt Lake is known as a terminal basin, meaning its water has no outlet. “Water escapes through evaporation, and everything else stays there,” says Jaimi Butler, coordinator of the Great Salt Lake Institute. At the time the sculpture was built, the water level of the lake was particularly low. But by 1972, the water rose again to near-average levels, submerging the artwork.

“Smithson anticipated that the lake would rise and fall, the residue of salt crystals causing the black rocks to glisten white whenever the water level dropped,” the New York Times Magazine wrote in 2002. And indeed, that very year, regional droughts caused the jetty to reappear “for the first prolonged period in its history,” according to the Dia Foundation, which now owns the sculpture. (The Great Salt Lake Institute partners with the Dia Foundation and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts to oversee the Spiral Jetty.)

Photo by Nancy Holt.

“[Smithson] worked with a local construction team to mine the basalt out of the hills and make this spiral,” says Bonnie K. Baxter, director of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College, in Salt Lake City, Utah. “There was a period in history when that part of Utah was volcanic,” and basalt forms from lava. Smithson used more than 6,000 tons of black basalt and earth to create his counterclockwise spiral.

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Baxter, who’s also a biology professor at Westminster College, has been periodically conducting research in the area with students since 1998. For several years, “I never saw Spiral Jetty. I would go there, I would sample with students, but it just wasn’t visible,” she says. So when the piece reemerged, “that was the first time I saw it. I knew this site so well, but I’d never seen the artwork. It just had a stunning effect on me.”

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Baxter and the Great Salt Lake Institute are interested in investigating whether the lake’s microbes can digest hydrocarbon coming in from oil seeps, and further, whether they might be useful in cleaning up oil wells in other cases. The Institute is also collaborating with NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory to research how long salt or gypsum crystals in the lake might be able to store biological molecules like cellulose or DNA, because that might help inform future biological work on the Red Planet. For example, if at some point there were water or life on Mars, “maybe it left some tracer molecules behind,” Baxter says.

Read the full original article on ScienceFriday.com